Lying in the cause of Zionism - Defending Zionism’s Abandonment of the Jews during the Holocaust

A reply to Jamie Robert’s When is Holocaust Revisionism OK?

My attention has been drawn to a typically dishonest Zionist response to my article by one Jamie Roberts.  

I recently posted an article The anti-Zionist Bund led the Jewish Resistance in Poland whilst the Zionist Movement abandoned the Jews.  It described the heroic role of the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund in leading the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance against the Nazis.  The fact that Zionists feel the need to blatantly lie, when the evidence is there for all to see, not least from Zionist historians themselves, demonstrates that the Zionist movement has a lot to hide.

The Bund were a mass Jewish party in Poland before the war.  Half of the Jewish dead in the Holocaust, some 3 million people, came from Poland.  As the fight against anti-Semitism in Poland grew, and anti-Semitism was rife in Poland in the pre-war years amongst the middle class and petit bourgeoisie, the Bund marginalised the Zionists.  

In the last free municipal elections in 1938, in Warsaw of the 20 Jewish council seats, the Bund gained 17.  The Zionists gained precisely one.  In Lodz, Poland’s second city, the Bund gained 11 out of 17 seats. The Bund received 61% of the Jewish vote in Warsaw.  This pattern was repeated throughout Poland and together with the Polish Socialist Party gained a majority in one-third of Poland’s towns and cities.

The Zionists who, in the 1920’s had had a mass base in Poland, withered away and split into Right and Left Poale Zion.  Left Poale Zion formed the majority group and they were barely Zionists at all as they prioritised the fight against the fascists over and above the cause of Palestine.  The most well-known figure in LPZ was Emmanuel Ringleblum, the Chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Why did the Jews of Poland abandon the Zionists?  Isaac Deutscher in his Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (pp. 66/7) provides a clue:

‘It should be remembered that the great majority of East European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the second world war, opposed to Zionism... The most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine... in the idea of an exodus, from the countries in which they had their home and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries, the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out’. The Zionists were agreeing to get out.’

In my article I quoted from the speech of Irena Klepfisz, the daughter of a Bundist who was killed in the Warsaw Jewish resistance.  Irena was born in the Warsaw Ghetto.  It was a moving speech in New York on the 74^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance.

Marek Edelman, Bundist and last Commander of the Jewish Resistance in Warsaw

In my article, I showed how the Zionist youth, to whom I paid tribute to for their heroism, were abandoned by the Zionist movement in Palestine.  I wrote that the:

Zionist youth certainly fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance but they did it, not as Zionists but despite their Zionism.  Their political parties were opposed to resistance and most of the Jewish collaborators in the Jewish Council (Judenrat) were Zionists.  

Clearly this was painful for Zionism’s youthful liar Jamie Roberts.  Instead of refuting what I said he asked the stupid question ‘when is Holocaust Revisionism ok’.  Of course the answer is that it is never ok, but what I wrote didn’t ‘revise’ history it painted an alternative to the nonsense parroted by the bourgeois media and the Zionists, which is that the only Jews who fought were the Zionists and that all Jews in Europe dreamed of nothing but going to Palestine.

Zivia Lubetkin - a Zionist member of the Jewish Resistance who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto with Bundist Marek Edelman

Holocaust Revisionism is the series of lies peddled by neo-Nazis and their friends, the kind of people who today can often be found in bed with the Zionists, because both share a hatred of Muslims and Arabs, which pretends that the Holocaust never happened.  It is ironic that Holocaust denying parties like the British National Party are, at one and the same time, avid supporters of Israel.  The examples are legion of anti-Semites supporting Israel and Zionism from Poland’s Michal Kaminski to Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Bannon.

Jamie Roberts is forced to reply to an article which I didn’t write because he finds it impossible to respond to the article I did write.  The question I posed was a very simple one.  Why did the Zionist movement abandon its own youth in the Warsaw Ghetto and why did it instruct them not to participate in the Resistance?

You needn’t hold your breath for an answer because it is highly doubtful that Jamie Roberts has a clue as to the answer.  That is why the fool accuses me of having ‘ignored the fact that the leader of Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) was Mordechai Anielewicz, who was also leader of the Zionist-socialist youth organisation, Hashomer Hatzair.’

I ignored nothing.  Quite the contrary.  I specifically referred to the Zionist youth who, despite opposition from their parent Zionist parties, fought side by side with the Communists and the Bund.  I pay tribute to them.  Mordechai Anielewicz was chosen as the first Commander of ZOB because he was the only one who had military training.  Although Roberts is clearly unfamiliar with anything but a Hollywood version of what happened in the Warsaw ghetto, it is quite clear that the Zionist youth fought, not because of Zionism but despite it.

Anielewicz however, expressed his regret over the “wasted time” undergoing Zionist educational work. [Gutman p.143. The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943, The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982)  Yitzhak Zuckerman told the Council of Kibbutz Ha Meuchad in May 1947 that “had the fate of the Jews in 1942 lain in the hands only of the political parties (Zionist - TG), the revolt would never have taken place.” [Gutman, p. 441 fn. 23]

I also described how Anielewicz’s successor as Commander of ZOB, the Bundist Marek Edelman, was written out of the Zionist version of the Warsaw ghetto resistance because he was not a Zionist and because he had compared the Palestinian resistance to that of the Jewish Resistance in Warsaw.  When he died a few years ago, although he received a state funeral in Poland, with the President attending and a 15 gun salute, there was not one  person, not even the lowest clerk, from the Israeli Embassy.  Zionism wrote Edelman out of the history records.

It is a measure of the desperation of Zionism’s poisonous little propagandists that they have to resort to lies and inventions because they know in their heart of hearts that when the Jews of Europe were fighting for their lives and dying, the Zionist movement outside Europe was more concerned with building their bastard racial state than in supporting those who were still alive.

Don’t take my word for it.  Let me quote the eminently respectable Saul Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-1945.  Friedlander is an American/Israeli Emeritus Professor History and a Zionist, but unlike Jamie Roberts he isn’t a hack and he also knows something about the Holocaust which is why he was extremely critical for example of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister for his refusal to lend assistance to attempts to save the Jews of Europe unless it was tied to the Zionist movement’s priority of building for a Jewish state.   This is what Friedlander had to say:

Whereas Bundist youth stayed in close contact with a senior leadership that remained in occupied Poland, the Zionist youth movements gradually lost touch with party headquarters in Palestine.  The ideological fervor of this Zionist youth did not falter – it was possibly even heightened by the surrounding circumstance; the response from Palestine, however, soon dwindled to increasingly unrealistic and perfunctory advice and instructions and often it lapsed into silence.    Such indifference created a growing rift and soon turned into a desperate sense of independence among the local youth leaders, the oldest of whom were in their early twenties at most.’

Perhaps Saul Friedlander is a Holocaust Revisionist too?  Or maybe anyone telling the truth about the Zionist role during the Nazi era is a revisionist?  Given that the Zionist movement during the war all but refused to acknowledge that there was a Holocaust taking place (& for this I suggest people read the 2 volume Post Ugandan Zionism by another Zionist, Shabtai Beit Zvi for details) it is the Zionist ideologues like Roberts who share most in common with holocaust deniers.

Roberts refers to the lies and half truths of Ken Livingstone.  If this were the case then the Labour Right would have expelled him for those lies.  Instead they chose not to contest what Livingstone said.  The reason is clear – what he said about the Nazis supporting Zionism before the Final Solution is, unfortunately, only too true.

Tony Greenstein